Transparency International (2018), a noted non-governmental organization focused on rooting out corruption, states that the failure to curb corruption is contributing to the worldwide crisis of democracy. Only twenty countries have improved their corruption levels, while the rest have either stagnated or worsened since 2012. According to managing director Patricia Moreira ‘With many democratic institutions under threat across the globe – often by leaders with authoritarian or populist tendencies – we need to do more to strengthen checks and balances and protect citizens’ rights’.
This chapter examines how corruption undermines democracy. Many studies argue that high levels of corruption are a sign of democratic decay, but what are the ways in which corruption drives democratic erosion? Corruption is an oft cited reason for coups (Hiroi and Omori, 2013) and revolutions (Tucker, 2007), but there is less scholarship that has explored the relationship between corruption and democratic decay (Hiroi and Omori, 2013). A few studies have demonstrated that high levels of corruption are harmful to democratic consolidation, because corruption affects political legitimacy (Seligson, 2002a; Warren, 2004). Corruption affects a country’s political culture, leading to low levels of trust in public institutions, which has a severe impact on the commitment to civic activity and collective projects (Doig and Theobald, 2000). For example, the level of political corruption in Nigeria has affected its political culture substantially. There is decreasing confidence and trust in the state’s ability to organize free and fair elections and be accountable to its citizens (Ogundiya, 2010; Basiru, 2018). Rising corruption also creates fertile ground for the emergence of messianic styles of leadership that can ‘save’ the public from corrupt elites of the past.
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